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Riding the Narwhal: Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04

Ars reviews Unity in Ubuntu 11.04.

Configuring Unity

The Unity-based Ubuntu desktop is much more configurable than GNOME 3.0. It comes with the classic GNOME Appearance Preferences dialog, which can be used to choose custom Gtk+ styles, icons, wallpapers, window decorator themes, and widget colors. Although you can still adjust all of these settings as you could in previous versions, not all of the window decorator themes look right with the new global menubar when a window is maximized.

The Unity shell itself is also somewhat configurable, though the options aren't easily accessible through a standard preference tool. In order to change the default Unity settings, you will have to install the Compiz Config Settings Manager—also known as CCSM—a complex control panel that allows users to fiddle with much of the inner works of Compiz.

To access Unity settings, you click the Unity tile in the CCSM plugin list. There are two tabs, one with standard settings and one with experimental settings. One of the options that will appeal to many users is the ability to adjust the dock's autohide behavior. The default setting is "Dodge" mode, which will cause it to hide when there is a window in the way. You can disable dock hiding completely so that the dock is always visible or you can switch to conventional autohide mode, which will cause the dock to always hide when it is not in use regardless of window proximity.

On the "Experimental" tab of the settings, you can adjust the behavior of the dock panel. For example, you can choose whether to show the colored rectangles behind the dock icons. Some users might want to choose the "toggle" setting for this feature, which will only put the colored rectangles behind the dock icons of applications that are currently running. If you are using a tile icon theme like the popular Faenza set, you might want to turn off the colored rectangles entirely. You can also adjust the animation behavior for dock hiding, application launching, and application urgent notices.

My favorite Unity setting is the slider for adjusting the size of the launcher icons in the dock. The default is set at 48 pixels, which is rather large. I drag the slider down to 32, which is the smallest supported size. This makes the dock waste less horizontal space and also lets me see more launchers in it at once. At that width, it's quite comfortable to have the dock on the screen all the time, so I also disable hiding completely.

Unfortunately, there are no options for moving the position of the dock at this time. You can't change its orientation or move it to a different screen edge.

Classic mode

Although Unity is a big step forward for usability in many ways, there are still obviously a lot of rough edges. Ubuntu 11.04 comes with a separate environment, called the "classic" mode, that provides a more traditional GNOME 2.x-style computing experience for users who find that preferable.

The classic mode uses the old GNOME panel system with a traditional two-panel layout. It has a regular old task list in the bottom panel instead of the fancy new dock. The top panel has the old applications, places, and system launcher menus on the left-hand side and application indicators on the right-hand side. It looks basically like the regular desktop from the previous version of Ubuntu.

The classic mode's default configuration doesn't have a global menubar—the menus remain in their individual windows. You can, however, manually enable the global menubar in classic mode by adding the "Indicator Applet Appmenu" applet into one of the GNOME panels. You can position the global menubar wherever you want in the panel.

The classic mode is a great feature for users who dislike Unity or aren't ready yet to make the jump. You can easily configure it to give you the best of both worlds. For example, I set up the top panel with a GNOME Main Menu applet, the global menubar applet, and the workspace switcher applet. Next, I removed the bottom panel and installed Docky.

Now I have a more configurable dock that can work with any screen edge, a clean menu-based application launcher that works better than the atrocious app lens, a workspace switcher that gives me live previews, and I get global menus without the annoying title hiding behavior.

Unity 2D

Much like GNOME Shell, the new Unity environment relies on hardware-accelerated rendering and won't run without compatible 3D graphics hardware. Users who don't have supported hardware will be bumped into a fallback mode without compositing.

An alternate implementation of the Unity shell, called Unity 2D, is being developed with the Qt toolkit to serve as the eventual fallback. Unity 2D will offer roughly the same experience as the regular Unity environment, but without some of the bling. It's not quite ready yet to be included as the default non-accelerated fallback environment, but it will ship as a standard component in the official Natty release for ARM.

In the regular x86 builds of Ubuntu 11.04, the classic mode is currently used as the non-composited fallback environment. Users who get bumped to the fallback can, however, manually install Unity 2D now if they want the Unity experience without compositing.